How Eternal Strands Is Bending Unreal Engine 5 to its Will First

ign.com:

In their small office tucked away in Quebec City, Canada, IGN sat down with three of Yellow Brick Games’ technical gurus: CTO Louis Tremblay, VFX Lead Raphaelle Dubois-Beauchamp, and Game Director and Co-Founder Frederic St-Laurent. Together we discussed the unique aspects of their upcoming game, Eternal Strands, which makes impressive use of Unreal Engine 5’s capabilities.

IGN: I keep hearing people on your team talking about the concept of “merging physics with magic.” Can you talk about what that means and how you’re accomplishing that with Unreal 5?

Tremblay: In Eternal Strands, we wanted to merge our magic with the physics gameplay. That was something that […] we wanted to achieve for a very long time is trying to bring the joyfulness of physics games and simulation games into a more action-packed game.

​​To achieve that, every object in the game has a temperature and we also split the air inside small blocks of air, so everything inside the game has a temperature. We have heat that can propagate from one object to the air environment. We have the opposite, cold can also propagate and cool down objects and cool down the air. So in our game, objects can burst into flames simply because the air around it is hot or something can have its combustion extinguished simply because it's surrounded by cold air.

So for the same reason, we have objects that fall into water, can heat the water, and produce vapor and have smoke effects and stuff like that, so all of our environment is simulating temperature. So we can have cold propagation, heat propagation that can start fires and can be extinguished by other effects. So if I can give an example, a fire breath of a dragon will actually heat the environment and start a fire and that fire will also heat the environment and have fire propagation.

Dubois-Beauchamp: So if, for example, you're fighting the fire drake that will blast fire into your face, you can cast a wall of ice and reflect that fire back at other NPCs […] which